Under the Influence

This is the meta-blog, for blogging my research and implementation of the Bad Influences project, and anything else of interest that occurs to me along the way. Expect thoughts and observations on the writing process, how time is constructed by and constructs narrative, disaster, radical politics, cats, vegetable gardening and knitting.

So, I’ve recently been putting together the site for Among Us, a Twitter Fiction project that I’m curating for the Twitter Fiction festival in March. Please have a look, share, retweet and join in! As a 24-hour project it’ll be much more manageable than Bad Influences, and you can tweet as much or […]

I’ve finally got my draft thesis introduction into my supervisors, so before they ask me to start on the first chapter, here’s the first in that series of reflections I promised on the three major aspects of blog fiction. First, epistolary, or writing as if the character is writing a document.

First, apologies to all interested parties for leaving it until so long after the end of the story to post some kind of conclusion here. After BI finished, I took a short holiday from it, which grew unintentionally longer. Since then I’ve been reading and thinking about blog fiction and other things, and frankly getting […]

Regular readers will have noticed the redesign of the blog links on the left sidebar of this site. As I mentioned in Character exposition in blogfic pt. 2, part of the advice I was given by the panel on my transfer Viva was that the cartoony nature of the icons was incongruous with the […]

I was first recommended Jennifer Egan’s A Vist from the Goon Squad by a student in my writing class. I began browsing the powerpoint chapter Great Rock and Roll Pauses while the class was on a timed workshop exercise, and it took some effort to drag my attention back after five minutes. I was […]

I’m long overdue a report back from Mix: Digital, where I gave my presentation on Bad Influences and managed to get through it just about in time and without too much babbling. It seemed to go well, and questions focused on the writing process and how I went about the project (rather than the kind of things […]

I’m recently back from the Mix: Digital conference, which was full of inspiring people and projects that I’ll blog about soon. First, though, I want to quickly post something I should have mentioned much earlier. I’ve not had a lot of time to keep up with forums lately, so apologies to the wonderful people […]

I thought Bad Influences was developing a decent following until a topical little post I made on an unrelated blog started modestly trending. All other concerns went out the window as I watched the stats climb into the hundreds, then thousands, tracking down shares and retweets from people speaking languages I didn’t recognise and watching […]

Getting across a picture of a character is always difficult in first person narratives, which can trap the writer between the character’s self-image and the reader’s credulity. Most of the more overused devices don’t even work in blog fiction, as the characters are unlikely to catch sight of themselves in a mirror while typing in […]

I had an entry on character exposition in blogfic ready to go up a couple of weeks ago, but after so much discussion on why my character exposition wasn’t working as well as it might for some readers, I thought I’d make some revisions, or at least clarifications. I want to be clear that I’m […]